zgmc
Registered Senior Member
Thanks for the reply. I want to understand how this works. What is the absorption band, and why does it reach a saturation point?
Is global warming even real?
- Thread starter Ilikeponies579
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Different molecules absorb different wavelengths of light. Put another way, they are opaque to some and transparent to others. For example, water vapor (a very strong greenhouse gas) is transparent to visible wavelengths of light, which is why you can see through air that has humidity. However, it is opaque to many infrared bands. This is one reason that humid nights "feel" warmer - the water vapor blocks the infrared radiation from the ground from getting into space.
See below for what frequencies different molecules absorb.
Note that when energy is allowed in (sunlight) but not allowed out (infrared radiation) the planet gets warmer. When the opposite happens it gets cooler. Thus by increasing gases that stop infrared energy the planet gets warmer; increasing gases that stop visible light would tend to cool the planet.
Sometimes a frequency of energy is completely 'saturated' by the molecule and none of that energy gets through. Sometimes it is not saturated, and some of the energy gets through. In the case of CO2, it is almost saturated - so that increasing it has a small effect overall on heat retained.
In the graph below, 100ppm of CO2 (a very low concentration, lower than we have now) is compared to 1000ppm (much more than we have now.) Note that they are almost the same, since the band is almost saturated. The small difference represents about only 5 watts out of the 1370 watts per square meter that hits our planet every day. Since the change is even smaller than is shown here, we have so far increased warming due to CO2 by only about 1 watt per square meter. (Other AGW gases and land use changes make up the difference.)
zgmc
Registered Senior Member
Thank you. That makes sense. So, what is the saturation point? surely this does not mean that there is no danger involved with our rising co2 levels?Different molecules absorb different wavelengths of light. Put another way, they are opaque to some and transparent to others. For example, water vapor (a very strong greenhouse gas) is transparent to visible wavelengths of light, which is why you can see through air that has humidity. However, it is opaque to many infrared bands. This is one reason that humid nights "feel" warmer - the water vapor blocks the infrared radiation from the ground from getting into space.
See below for what frequencies different molecules absorb.
Note that when energy is allowed in (sunlight) but not allowed out (infrared radiation) the planet gets warmer. When the opposite happens it gets cooler. Thus by increasing gases that stop infrared energy the planet gets warmer; increasing gases that stop visible light would tend to cool the planet.
Sometimes a frequency of energy is completely 'saturated' by the molecule and none of that energy gets through. Sometimes it is not saturated, and some of the energy gets through. In the case of CO2, it is almost saturated - so that increasing it has a small effect overall on heat retained.
In the graph below, 100ppm of CO2 (a very low concentration, lower than we have now) is compared to 1000ppm (much more than we have now.) Note that they are almost the same, since the band is almost saturated. The small difference represents about only 5 watts out of the 1370 watts per square meter that hits our planet every day. Since the change is even smaller than is shown here, we have so far increased warming due to CO2 by only about 1 watt per square meter. (Other AGW gases and land use changes make up the difference.)
It would take Venus levels of CO2 to really saturate that band. Fortunately we are unlikely to hit those levels.
The current forcing (1.6 watts per square meter) is still causing temperatures to rise, and as CO2 increases, so will the temperature rise. That's the danger.
zgmc
Registered Senior Member
There are some sites out there that are taking the saturation point to mean that there is nothing to worry about. one even said that temps would stay within beneficial levels because of it. Its so dishonest.
People often forget to take into account things such as pressure broadening - it's not quite as simple as "we reach some magical level and CO2 stops absorbing additional energy."
In hindsight you're right, you made an error, you're also right again, I failed to notice it the first time round because I wasn't paying that much attention - didn't seem that important, or relevant for that matter.
If you came on this forum and claimed that the atmosphere was warming because Godzilla had arisen from the Sea of Japan and was breathing fire into it, the people responding would probably ignore the details of your calculations of Godzilla's kilocaloric output.milkweed said:
Or maybe not - that might be kind of fun.
You are being played by a propaganda site. It doesn't matter how they do it - if they can convince you that your ignorance and incomprehension is the measure of honest communication,
that (for example here) the Standard Units of measurement and the ordinary language of the scientific community is evidence of a conspiracy to hide physical realities from the laity
they win, regardless of their arithmetic (not math). It's their argument that is the problem, not their (or your) arithmetic.
And they seem to have won. You have not, for example, undertaken the twenty minutes of casual study it would take you to comprehend, say, joules and understand why they are used in those reports. You have instead cut yourself off from all information from sources that employ such terms, and extended your firewall to everyone who accepts and argues from their findings.
So your incoming "information" and worldview is now controlled by the people who finance and and promulgate and otherwise amplify Joannova and related sources.
This leads to you coming unto a science forum and mocking serious reports of global warming because they employ the term "joules", and demanding that forum members pay attention to the details of arithmetical calculations you have made in the service of nonsense and bullshit.
Notice one thing: the people behind Joannova et al are wealthy - among the richest people on the planet, actually. And yet they finance little or no actual research in these matters. They have nothing of their own to report - only allegations and accusations and flaw-findings regarding research done by others. They spend tens of millions of dollars every year on promoting these claims, and nothing on investigation of their own into relevant physical reality. Why do you suppose that is?
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Came across this this morning: http://www.geologypage.com/2015/02/evidence-from-warm-past-confirms-recent.html Basically, what it has to say is that historic climate change, the climate change not caused by humans that people keep mentioning, suggests that the IPCC's estimates of climate sensitivity are correct.
Get that?
1. Nobody is saying that historic climate change was caused by humans - that's a misdirection.
2. Nobody is ignoring or dismissing historic climate change, we've been studying what's happened in the past to understand what may happen in the future.
3. According to this study, at least, it appears that the IPCC's estimates of climate sensitivity were correct.
Get that?
1. Nobody is saying that historic climate change was caused by humans - that's a misdirection.
2. Nobody is ignoring or dismissing historic climate change, we've been studying what's happened in the past to understand what may happen in the future.
3. According to this study, at least, it appears that the IPCC's estimates of climate sensitivity were correct.
to Billvon: I "liked" you informative post 302. Not much new to me, but many (especially AGW deniers) need to understand what you presented there.
I have only one, very important, comment to add:
The third part of your first graph shows the total absorption of out going IR and tells the major componets doing that. Some may see that CH4 is blocking much less IR than CO2, and falsely conclude that methane is nothing to be concered with - but it is, as the amount in releasable CH4 in water hydrates is huge, especially now that a tongue of the warm denser (due to salt content) of the Gulf Stream is now entering and flowing along the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.
Kilometer diameter clouds of CH4 bubbles are now coming up to the surface - that was not belived to be possible a few years ago, as the small bubbles were to dissolve in the ocean water, before they could reach the surface. They do have a very small "terminal speed" of rise thru water; however now they are making the whole water column above their decomposition points less dense, so they are being convected up to the surface. There are photographs showing these "bubble clouds" reaching the surface.
Unlike CO2, CH4 is far from saturation and is much stronger absorber, molecule by molecule, than CO2. It is now doing less because for every 400 or so CO2 molecules there is only 1 molecule of CH4 in the air, yet there could be dozens* more and still be far from saturation. I.e. in the decades time scale, CH4, not CO2, is the real threat to warm blooded animals that don't live in water, like whales, or are very tiny, like the smallest of mice that have much larger surface to volume ratios and can still cool their metabolic heat generation. (Mice also like to spend their days in their burrows, safe from hungry birds, where the temperature is the diurnal average. Eat seeds at night with only owls to fear.)
Humans, just sitting in chair need to dump to their environment about 100W, and more if working.
The Bible is correct: "The meek shall inherit the earth."
I. e. when man and a larger animals (especially those like dogs, that can only perspire via their tongues) are all extinct, the smallest mice will rule the earth.
Although I have done it several times before, I again explain why CH4 is so much better at blocking IR (and surface reflected sunlight) trying to escape than CO2, which is a linear molecule. I. e. is O-C-O not a "3D molecule" like CH4, which has moment of inertia about all three axis (more ways to hold rotational energy) and many more vibrational and flexing modes that can absorb radiant energy trying to escape from earth..
* Not only is the CH4 release rate rapidly increasing (on decades or more time scale) each molecule reaching the air last ever longer as they are mainly destroyed by the OH- radical, two of which are destroyed for each CH4 destroyed. I.e. for more than 800,000 years (See graph at end) the solar UV flux kept concentration of OH- high wrt that of CH4, but now it is the increasing concentration of CH4 in the air that is lowering the OH- concentration. For example in 2003 the half life of CH4 was 9.6 years, but in 2013 it had increased to 12.6 years so now this powerful green house gas has its half life increasing at 0.3 year / year. Even with the lesser earlier half life, in the first decade after release, each Kgram of CH4 did more trapping of IR than 100Kg of CO2 did!
Again: the real extinction thread is CH4 (assuming ocean acidification and AGW's rainfall shifts, etc. do not destroy the bottom of the food chain first.)
I have only one, very important, comment to add:
The third part of your first graph shows the total absorption of out going IR and tells the major componets doing that. Some may see that CH4 is blocking much less IR than CO2, and falsely conclude that methane is nothing to be concered with - but it is, as the amount in releasable CH4 in water hydrates is huge, especially now that a tongue of the warm denser (due to salt content) of the Gulf Stream is now entering and flowing along the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.
Kilometer diameter clouds of CH4 bubbles are now coming up to the surface - that was not belived to be possible a few years ago, as the small bubbles were to dissolve in the ocean water, before they could reach the surface. They do have a very small "terminal speed" of rise thru water; however now they are making the whole water column above their decomposition points less dense, so they are being convected up to the surface. There are photographs showing these "bubble clouds" reaching the surface.
Unlike CO2, CH4 is far from saturation and is much stronger absorber, molecule by molecule, than CO2. It is now doing less because for every 400 or so CO2 molecules there is only 1 molecule of CH4 in the air, yet there could be dozens* more and still be far from saturation. I.e. in the decades time scale, CH4, not CO2, is the real threat to warm blooded animals that don't live in water, like whales, or are very tiny, like the smallest of mice that have much larger surface to volume ratios and can still cool their metabolic heat generation. (Mice also like to spend their days in their burrows, safe from hungry birds, where the temperature is the diurnal average. Eat seeds at night with only owls to fear.)
Humans, just sitting in chair need to dump to their environment about 100W, and more if working.
The Bible is correct: "The meek shall inherit the earth."
I. e. when man and a larger animals (especially those like dogs, that can only perspire via their tongues) are all extinct, the smallest mice will rule the earth.
Although I have done it several times before, I again explain why CH4 is so much better at blocking IR (and surface reflected sunlight) trying to escape than CO2, which is a linear molecule. I. e. is O-C-O not a "3D molecule" like CH4, which has moment of inertia about all three axis (more ways to hold rotational energy) and many more vibrational and flexing modes that can absorb radiant energy trying to escape from earth..
* Not only is the CH4 release rate rapidly increasing (on decades or more time scale) each molecule reaching the air last ever longer as they are mainly destroyed by the OH- radical, two of which are destroyed for each CH4 destroyed. I.e. for more than 800,000 years (See graph at end) the solar UV flux kept concentration of OH- high wrt that of CH4, but now it is the increasing concentration of CH4 in the air that is lowering the OH- concentration. For example in 2003 the half life of CH4 was 9.6 years, but in 2013 it had increased to 12.6 years so now this powerful green house gas has its half life increasing at 0.3 year / year. Even with the lesser earlier half life, in the first decade after release, each Kgram of CH4 did more trapping of IR than 100Kg of CO2 did!
Again: the real extinction thread is CH4 (assuming ocean acidification and AGW's rainfall shifts, etc. do not destroy the bottom of the food chain first.)
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Problem is its your godzilla, not mine.
co2 from the burning of fossil fuels = fire breathing monster heating up atmosphere via dinosaurs.
Unsubstantiated propaganda from you.iceaura said:
Except it was another beeleever in catastrophic co2 using graphs that do not relay the information in temperature that I found translations for ...iceaura said:
2 sources.
omg the upper 2000 meters of ocean have heated a whopping 6 hundredths of a degree (c) in 50+ years. Via the Argo page at the university of California (san diego). Backed up by a blogger in Europe who claims to be a physicist who translated Joules into temp(c).
iceaura said:
Except I DID take the 20 minutes to find out the answer. WTF is Joules. You just dont like the answer because it does not match your expectations of CCC. 6/100ths of a degree in 2000 meters of ocean in 50+ years....
And your probably a bit embarrassed that you missed my (oh so obvious) math mistake being as it was simply a 10s based math.
Unless you didnt miss it and decided to with-hold the information because... well 10,000 x's as many Joules hit the earth via the sun vs Joules produced by mankind each year...
More unsubstantiated allegation.iceaura said:
zgmc
Registered Senior Member
What? There must have been an issue with your quote/reply function. I know what joules are.
aw, dont let it bother you. Its become apparent some dont pay much attention to detail.
I know, right? Heaven forbid that anyone should attribute to you any level of competence and fail to double check every calculation you make... :roll:
Back to the theme of the thread, is global warming even real. A while back I posted this:
~~ Anyways the point of introducing the MSP GISS data is the newer thermometers are introducing a warming at least in some locations.
milkweed, Jan 13, 2015 #235
~~
In the last week some interesting information has arisen in other points on the web. On the same day as I posted the above, on a different blog it was revealed a german meterologist had done a side by side study of old vs new thermometers.
http://notrickszone.com/2015/01/13/...-electronic-measurement/#sthash.YTFQGhM4.dpbs
Somewhere along the lines I read a comment that said basically
... Well there is the explanation for the pause. increasing temps until all the new equipment in place and then the pause began...
And there is more.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wor...ys-temperature-record-has-been-tampered-with/
This one I was aware of back in 2012 but feel its graphs better show the change:
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/01/30/how-ghcn-keep-rewriting-reykjavik-history/
reference via Icelandic Met Office:
http://en.vedur.is/climatology/articles/nr/1213
Australia has similar issues. JoNova and others cover those quite well.
Homogenization is an effect all unto itself. I followed a few links suggested by others and one, a canadian edu was especially enlightening. Gave you a test run diy sample that you could compare your results to their answer. The first notable problem with their example was they broke one of the main rules I had been reading about on other sites. Dont compare river delta cities with inland positions. OK, I can still do it with the other 2 sites they present. Then I thought, wait a minute... what are the plant growing zones? and I looked them up. The 2 remaining sites they used were in different plant growing zones!
Now I am unsure exactly how they implement homogenization. But heres a jpg of the zones:
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/monitoring-references/maps/us-climate-divisions-names.jpg
Heres the plant hardiness zones:
http://planthardiness.ars.usda.gov/PHZMWeb/images_ui/homepage_map.jpg
My NOAA zone runs across three plant hardiness zones.
Anyways, is there global warming? Seems so. Is it man-made? Very possible. Is it co2? Well thats not so clear.
~~ Anyways the point of introducing the MSP GISS data is the newer thermometers are introducing a warming at least in some locations.
milkweed, Jan 13, 2015 #235
~~
In the last week some interesting information has arisen in other points on the web. On the same day as I posted the above, on a different blog it was revealed a german meterologist had done a side by side study of old vs new thermometers.
article said:
http://notrickszone.com/2015/01/13/...-electronic-measurement/#sthash.YTFQGhM4.dpbs
Somewhere along the lines I read a comment that said basically
... Well there is the explanation for the pause. increasing temps until all the new equipment in place and then the pause began...
And there is more.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wor...ys-temperature-record-has-been-tampered-with/
This one I was aware of back in 2012 but feel its graphs better show the change:
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/01/30/how-ghcn-keep-rewriting-reykjavik-history/
article above said:
reference via Icelandic Met Office:
http://en.vedur.is/climatology/articles/nr/1213
Australia has similar issues. JoNova and others cover those quite well.
Homogenization is an effect all unto itself. I followed a few links suggested by others and one, a canadian edu was especially enlightening. Gave you a test run diy sample that you could compare your results to their answer. The first notable problem with their example was they broke one of the main rules I had been reading about on other sites. Dont compare river delta cities with inland positions. OK, I can still do it with the other 2 sites they present. Then I thought, wait a minute... what are the plant growing zones? and I looked them up. The 2 remaining sites they used were in different plant growing zones!
Now I am unsure exactly how they implement homogenization. But heres a jpg of the zones:
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/monitoring-references/maps/us-climate-divisions-names.jpg
Heres the plant hardiness zones:
http://planthardiness.ars.usda.gov/PHZMWeb/images_ui/homepage_map.jpg
My NOAA zone runs across three plant hardiness zones.
Anyways, is there global warming? Seems so. Is it man-made? Very possible. Is it co2? Well thats not so clear.
The words you quoted do not appear in the post linked by your quote. Did you quote the wrong person? Please check this.
Bizarre. That came from a standard reply, with the text that was added by the system. I agree it's not in his post now.
What do you mean by "a standard reply".
What text was added by the system?
Now was it in any previous version of that post. I can see all versions that have been posted (i.e. the versions pre- and post- any editing of the post).
When you click "reply" a reply box is opened with quoted text from the post you are replying to. That's where the text I replied to came from.